“If you didn’t care at all about people and you just cared about the deficit, this is just a stupid way to go about it. It doesn’t work. Austerity does not lead to deficit reduction. That we are continuing not to look at the facts, to me is stunning. It is the definition of insanity.”

[IT]WASthat Obama ran his election campaign to the tune of ... YES HE CAN

but Fred Greenstein concluded in my 2004 copy of his 2nd Editionof The Presidential Difference In the world of imagination it is possible to envisage a cognitively and emotionally intelligent chief executive, who happens also to be an inspiring public communicator, a capable White House organizer, and the possessor of exceptional political skill and vision. In the real world, human imperfection is inevitable, but some imperfections are more disabling than others. Many of the modern presidents have performed adequately without being brilliant orators. Only a few chief executives have been organizationally competent. A minimal level of political skill is a precondition of presidential effectiveness, but political skill is widely present in the handful of individuals who rise to the political summit.

Vision is rarer than skill, but only Lyndon Johnson was disastrously deficient in the realm of policy.

Finally there are thought and emotion. The importance of cognitive strength in the presidency should be self-evident. Still, Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Carter, and Clinton had impressive intellects and defective temperaments. They reversed Justice Holmes characterisation of FDR. Clinton’s foibles made him an underachiever and national embarrassment. Carter’s defective temperament contributed to making his time in office a period of lost opportunity. Johnson and Nixon presided over major policy breakthroughs, but also over two of the most un-happy episodes of the twentieth century. All four presidential experiences point to the following moral:

” Many of the moral heroes of the twentieth century were primarily defined not by their heroic use of power and office but by their inspired opposition to the powers that be—from Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. to Nelson Mandela. Moral courage, in the last century, has often meant fighting against corrupt structures of power rather than embracing those same structures as a means to achieve positive change. Watching President Obama over the last week in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Buchenwald, and Normandy made me realize that we have crossed a threshold. Here is a progressive president who is directly engaged with some of the most delicate moral minefields of geopolitics. Yet, he is completely comfortable with power (but not enamored with it) and is turning morality and idealism into diplomatic tools of the best kind.

So here’s to a President who is unafraid of moral clarity, who can unapologetically call on our highest, moral aspirations without a hint of irony. And here’s to a President who can turn the bully pulpit around and address the world, turning morality and idealism into diplomatic tools of the best kind—the ones that inspire the best—and shame the worst—in us all.”

In the context of Will's zBlog@gaia and my comment elsewhere, IT IS most refreshing that THEWOMAN, who possibly has a better all-inclusive global understanding than ALL the leaders of the world gathered for the climate conference in Copenhagenput together, decided to take the PUBLIC train for her holiday break destination rather than the ROYAL TRAIN to which she is entitled.

Why IS IT that our Members of Parliament, Members of the European Parliament, political classes (QUANGOs et al) and senior civil servants cannot demonstrate the same restraint in this countries time of need ?

… or DO THEY really think that the tax-payers pockets are endlessly deep !

"Evolutionary Enlightenment, and the new culture it promises, is something we can deliberately and consciously bring into being together, if we care deeply enough about the potential it is pointing to. But it is not something that can be simply manufactured through sitting in a circle and practicing a certain technique or generating a particular emotional state. It is an emergent perspective, or state of consciousness, that bursts forth spontaneously and miraculously only when the conditions are right. "Emergent" means that it is something greater than the sum of its parts-a new order of relatedness, a new level of consciousness, a deeper and higher perspective that is always unimaginable until the moment it explodes into existence." - Andrew Cohen

"EVOLUTIONARY is a play on the word "REVOLUTIONARY", and I mean it to convey something of the revolutionary nature of evolution as an idea. Evolutionaries are revolutionaries, with all the personal and philosophical commitment that word implies. They are not merely curious bystanders to the evolutionary process, passive believers in the established sciences of evolution, though all certainly value those insights. They are committed activists and advocates - often passionate ones - for the importance of evolution at a cultural level."

The Civil Service of the British Empire was once the envy of the world - and remained so until at least the time when I personally was recruited by the Ministry of Aviation as an Air Traffic Controller Cadet.

In the meantime the age of consumerism was established - Reagan and Thatcher initiated the BIG BANG of financial services - Clinton finally signed Glass Steagle into history - and the era of "greed is good" created the situation where certain leaders were taking home earnings that were 400 times more that the people who were sharpening their pencils - ALL of which brought to an end 60 years of actual and potential, equitable growth and prosperity for the peoples of the earth.

So began the rot from the head downwards of all matters concerning leadership - and as Damian Reece has recently commentedin The Telegraph -

"Until leaders capable of grappling with complex problems are either recruited, or created, in Whitehall and who can imbue in civil service staff a culture of performance and delivery, then ambitions to transform UK services as varied as education, welfare, transport and other infrastructure will be stymied.

Just as Britain's Olympic athletes have been transformed from well meaning but perennial losers into astonishing world beaters, so too must our civil service as a whole recognise it is simply not good enough and desperately needs to raise its game."

So when your governments tell you how valuable our banking system is, and how important our financial services sector is, don’t believe them. Most of it is as valuable to our lives and as energetically parasitic as a Flu virus. For sure, we need old-fashioned banks who help us move money around, and take care of our savings. Possibly we need insurance companies to help us deal with life’s risks. Maybe there is even some sense in having companies which manage investments – if that process can be removed from the paper-casino it currently lives in and revert to supporting companies to buy plant and equipment, or cover their trading cycles. But a City of London filled with financial institutions generating huge fantasy debts which we, our children and our grandchildren are supposed to pay back?They’re not worth the paper they’re NOT written on.

" When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society - they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorises it and a moral code that glorifies it "